The New York Times print edition’s daily television listings feel like an artifact from my childhood, when watching television was a family activity, and we saved the Austin American-Statesman’s weekly television listings, hoarding them until they inevitably went missing mid-week, causing a mild household crisis. But I digress.

Anyway, hidden within the tiny blocks of time that make up the Times television listings, are the most sharply insightful, unintentionally hilarious movie reviews. I discovered this today while idly picking through a two-week old copy of the Times.

I work very closely with Simi, a Jew who is very Orthodox (she’s my age and about to get married) and very modern (she associates with Jews of all types and started wearing pants last week).

Right before Rosh Hashanah, she was surprised to discover that there are observant Jews (Reform, etc.) who only do one day of yom tov. And yesterday she turned to me and said, “So I hear Reform Jews do actually fast on Yom Kippur.” I was dumbfounded.

A little while later, she saw an article someone posted on Facebook that had something to do with the Orthodox. A comment on it read, “I am almost always impressed by the trends of thought in Judaism. The only exceptions are anytime I encounter information about the Orthodox.”

Simi turned to me and said, “What is this about? Why do people think this?”

I don’t know anything about the mousse concoction she’s touting here, but it did remind me of that awesome icebox pie thing my mom used to make for Passover. (Mom, I know you’re reading this. You still make that?)

"It's been compared to paint thinner, lighter fluid and jet fuel, and has been pressed into service as a home cough remedy. In an air disaster scenario it might serve to disinfect a wound, or sterilize makeshift surgical tools."

There were so many sentences I wish I wrote in this piece. A few more:

Cossa was introduced to it by Bill Radosevich, a lead contamination specialist from Minneapolis whom he met at an environmental trade show in 2002, and whom he credits as “the foundation for slivovitz in this country.”

Though Cossa was reluctant to divulge the Drinkers Association’s precise procedures for naming judges, he did say that “every journeyman’s path is different, and customized to their distinct needs in traversing towards slivovitz and enlightenment.”

Judges are instructed to determine is the slivovitz tastes like old socks or a chemical waste dump, and whether or not it makes the tongue go numb.

The piece is full delightful tidbits (“According to the score sheet, it is mandatory to make a toast before each round.”) It’s things like this that restore my faith in humanity’s capacity to hold at bay the oppressive onslaught of the forces of boringness.

Actually, this was the original form of money. Credit systems, tabs, even expense accounts, all existed long before cash. These things are as old as civilization itself. True, we also find that history tends to move back and forth between periods dominated by bullion -- where it's assumed that gold and silver are money -- and periods where money is assumed to be an abstraction, a virtual unit of account.... what we are witnessing today is a return of assumptions that would have been considered obvious common sense in, say, the Middle Ages -- or even ancient Mesopotamia. ...on the kind of historical scale we're talking about here, a decade or two is nothing. We have very little idea what to expect.

Ms. Drescher, a cotheshorse, dug deep into her closet for outfit for Tuesday's weddings, choosing a black gown to wear under a black robe with gold clips, one of the costumes she'd kept from her role in "This is Spinal Tap," the 1984 rock mockumentary, in which her character complains about an album cover depicting a naked woman in a dog collar, sniffing a leather glove.

When I first posted this siddur trailer (!) over a year ago, I wrote that it was coming later in 2010. Since then, Amazon has emailed me like three times to tell me the release was being postponed. Well, it’s finally here. This morning, I played around with my new toy in shul. Here are some initial observations:

The Rav meets Sir Sacks:

There’s a lot of Modern Orthodox star power in this volume. Rabbi Joseph “The Rav” Soloveitchik did more in his lifetime to shape Modern Orthodoxy than anyone else ever has. This siddur includes his commentary throughout, as well as a number of great introductions and forewords about him and about his views on Jewish prayer.

At the same time, it’s still a member of the Koren Sacks family of siddurim because it still features the translation used in the Sacks siddur.

It’s yet another (mostly) beautiful Koren product:

Yes, it has the usual beautiful Koren typefaces and layout, but it doesn’t have the bookmark ribbons that some of their other recent siddurim have had, which is a little disappointing. And then there’s this:

In my copy of the Koren Mesorat HaRav Siddur, page 441/442 has some issues. The corner of this page arrived pre-bent. If it’s not totally apparent from the image above, here’s what it looked like when I unfolded it:

So that’s special.

It’s hard to read English from right to left:

It’s a recurring problem: A siddur should open from right to left, but anglophone siddurim have forewords and commentary printed in English, which makes for weird reading. Reading an introduction, when you get to the bottom of the page, you have to keep reading by looking at what would be the previous page in an English book. Koren has a clever way of helping you wrap your mind around this:

In lighter print, they indicate that you should continue reading on the next/previous page with the direction of the arrow and they tell you what the next English word will be. Koren is very focused on using visuals, rather than instructions, to help the user navigate the siddur. This is one of many cases in which they do this very well.

But I came across a problem today: They don’t do the same thing for a piece of commentary that lasts over multiple pages. For example, let’s say you there’s a piece of English commentary in the middle of the service that starts on the left leaf of a two-page spread (we’ll call it page 2). If this piece of commentary is long enough that it stretches over two pages, they run it on the next English page, but the previous Hebrew page, if that makes sense (we’ll call it page 1). If it’s longer than that (I found one like this in this siddur today), it then jumps two English pages back or two Hebrew pages forward (we’ll call it page 3). You with me? The point is, it’s downright confusing and Koren ought to use little arrows to help us through it.

It would be cooler if it wasn’t just Soloveitchik’s commentary:

In one of the introductory sections, Hanhagot HaRav, we get a list of his personal prayer practices. For instance, in Birchot Hashachar, he used to replace the word “goy/nation” in “shelo asani goy” with “nochri/stranger” because the Tanach sometimes uses the word “goy” in reference to the Jewish nation. He also used to omit “hanotein laya’ef ko’ach” because it wasn’t listed in the Talmud. Yet this siddur includes it as well as the word “goy,” as you can see:

It would be a lot cooler if it was the siddur according to Soloveitchik, rather than a siddur with his commentary.

Some new nikud?

Koren isn’t alone in this, but they like to indicate the difference between the two types of the shva vowel. They indicate which ones are vocalized and which ones are truly silent by making the dots of the vocalized shva a little bigger, as you can see in the word “hamevorach” from my copy of a different Koren siddur:

You can see that the shva under the mem is bolder than the shva under the final chaf. That’s what I’m talking about.

But in the Mesorat HaRav Siddur, they’ve got a new, more obvious way of marking the vocalized shva:

Now, they leave the shva itself alone so that both types appear the same. But they add a line above the letter that has the vocalized shva. The advantage is that it’s way more obvious. Plus, in the example above, you wouldn’t now that the shva in “barechu” is vocalized because there are no other shvas at that type size to compare it with.

But there’s only one play-by-play, complete with exhaustive notes on liturgical minutiae. Here it is.

Machzorim:

The Rabbinical Assembly? I never thought I’d see the day, but when it suddenly looked like hundreds (estimates have ranged from 700-1000; personally, I think it’s closer to 1000) would show up to this service, the Rabbinical Assembly of Conservative Judaism was the only organization that stepped up and helped out with some machzorim.

I want one! I, of course, brought my copy of Machzor Lev Shalem with me, but was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that the machzorim the RA was donating were these slim little paperback MLS “Kol Nidrei and Evening Service of Yom Kippur” booklets. At the end we were told we could keep them. I perked right up and this Hadar fellow I was sitting next to kindly offered me hers, which you can see above, next to my regular old MLS.

Are there more of these? Since I’m going to continue to use MLS as my primary machzor for the foreseeable future it would be great if there was a full set of these booklets. According to the inside front cover, they’re drafts that were piloted in a few Conservative shuls prior the full publication of MLS. By the end of YK, my arms were so tired from holding up the brick that is MLS that I found myself in dire need of a slimmer machzor option so I’m hoping I come across more of these someday.

It really is a machzor for all: When the RA was generating a lot of press for MLS, a little over a year ago, one note they hit over and over again was that MLS wasn’t merely a Conservative machzor, but that it was meant to be used by a much wider audience. It’s not only remarkable that they offered these up but that they were accepted. There was a time when establishment was establishment and anti-establishment was anti-establishment and never the twain shall meet. Today, the adherents of the traditional egalitarian style that is popular all over the non-denominational, non-establishment Jewish world has no problem using a Conservative machzor if it fits their needs.

Demographics: So there were a lot people, as I’ve mentioned. But one thing that’s been interesting about Occupy Wall Street and about this service in particular is the diversity of the crowd. As the protest has gone on, the protesters have gotten more generationally and racially diverse; and of course we’ve all heard about how ideologically diverse they are. The Jews at the service were no different. (Though they were not overly racially diverse, as you might imagine, I’m pretty sure I spotted the Black Jewish rapper Y-Love.) So in terms of age diversity, my mother was not the only person beyond her 30s there. And in terms of ideological diversity, I saw Jews I know from all over the denominational and ritual spectrum. (Except for the anti-mixed seating crowd, though I suspect there may have been some of them there as well.)

Our fearless leaders: Though organized by Sieradski, the service was led by the intrepid trio pictured above:

Getzel Davis: Getzel is a friend of mine from Limmud NY, though we see each other from time to time elsewhere now. He hosted me last year when I visited Hebrew College in Boston, where he is a fourth-year rabbinical student. Much more on Getzel later in the post.

Sarah Wolf: Sarah, a first-year rabbinical student at JTS here in New York, approached me before the service, wondering why she recognized me. We couldn’t figure it out and then it hit her: “Oh! Are you David Wilensky?” Apparently, she’s a fan of this blog.

Avi Fox-Rosen: Avi is a musician. I encountered him once before when he was a presenter at Limmud NY a couple of years ago. He chanted Kol Nidrei itself when the time came.

Sieradski and one of the leaders, Avi Fox-Rosen, attempt to create aisles. You can imagine how well that worked out.

Mic check! You may have read or heard about “the people’s mic,” the un-amplified method that the Occupy Wall Street protesters use to communicate to large crowds. The individual initiating it shouts, “Mic check!” The crowd responds in unison, “Mic check!” Repeat. The announcement is then delivered in short phrases, each one shouted back by the crowd before the speaker moves on to the next phrase. If the crowd is exceedingly large, the phrase may get repeated in multiple waves, taking two or three repetitions to reach the members of the crowd farthest from the speaker. This method was used throughout the service for page numbers, readings, etc.

Sieradski about an hour and a half before the service

Why are we here? Imagine the following all shouted by Sieradski in the call-and-response format described above:

Shatz: “Mic check!”

Kahal: “Mic check!”

Shatz: “Welcome to Kol Nidrei at Occupy Wall Street!”

Kahal: “Welcome to Kol Nidrei etc…”

“The reason we’re here is the prophet Isaiah!”

“Who requires not only a fast from food!”

[Some explanation of Isaiah's thing about "This is not the fast that I require, etc...]

“What better way to observe Yom Kippur!?”

“Than in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street!?”

And so forth.

Fun with page numbers: We began on page 204. Kind of. We began on page 204 of the full MLS that I brought with me. Since many others had it with them as well and since there were also 100 copies of that MLS Kol Nidrei booklet present, page numbers were announced for both. It was announced–via the shout-and-response method–that H=P+201, where H is the page number of the full hardcover edition of and P is the page number of the paperback booklet. This led to a lot of people’s mic announcements along the lines of the following, which never ceased to elicit a titter of giggles from the entire congregation:

Shatz: “We are beginning on page three!”

Kahal: “We are beginning on page three!”

Shatz: “And also on page 204!”

Kahal: “And also on page 204!”

Or Zarua: And begin on page 3/204 we did, with the chanting of “Or zarua latzadik ulyishrei-lev simchah” (Ps. 97:11) a few times. There was some clapping.

Three times, with hand signals: “Bishivah shel malah uvishivah shel matah… im ha’avaryanim” is traditionally recited thrice. To keep the crowd together, the shatz trio each waved a finger in the air as we said it the first time, two fingers the second time and three the third time. This was done a couple other times throughout the service for bits that are meant to be repeated a certain number of times.

QUESTION: Why am I enjoying this English? Getzel led us in some English corresponding to the bit we had just recited three times–call-and-response, of course. (In fact, from here on out you should assume that any English I mention was shouted out and then shouted back by the crowd.) I played along and had a series of thoughts about it while we shout-prayed in English:

This is nice.

Wait, why am I enjoying this?

Am I actually participating in this English?

Whatever, David, just go with it.

ANSWER: Because it was lively as all get-out! In services, you may find yourself saying two sorts of things out loud. You may sing or chant some Hebrew or you may recite some English. And by recite I mean mumble un-enthusiastically. And by mumble un-enthusiastically, I mean space out. But this was a whole other thing. Everyone paid perfect, rapt attention to all of the English we did throughout the service. And when they responded, they responded with vigor! I can’t believe I shouted English in the middle of a service the way I did during Kol Nidrei this year.

Kol Nidrei, once more with feeling: We said Kol Nidrei three times, each time building on the energy of the previous time.

Avi Fox-Rosen chanted Kol Nidrei through once. I was very close to the middle of the circle and found him only vaguely audible.

Getzel and Sarah joined AFR for the second time through. (All three of them waving two fingers in the air.) The crowd got in on the action a little bit this time.

By the third time, the whole crowd has heard the tune at least once. Some of us already know it, while I suspect some haven’t been to shul in years, but the excitement of this service seems to be jostling free the memory of this melody somewhere in the recesses of their brains. The third time through, Kol Nidrei is loud and proud.

Let the service speak for itself: I didn’t write down any of the things we were renouncing, but my notes at this point say, “He’s getting v. political. Unsettlingly. Let this event & the words of KN speak for themselves.”

Minutiae from my notes: We’re now on page 205/4. From my notes:

“Venislach lechol-adat… lechol ha’am bishgagah” once

Then “[Moses prayed:] ‘As befits Your abundant love… from Egypt until now.’ And there it further says:”

Then “Adonai replied, ‘I have forgiven, as you have asked.’”

Then “Selach-na la’avon ha’am… ve’ad-henah. Vesham ne’emar:”

Then Shehechiyanu to that sing-songy tune

The crowd that leads itself: AFR was going to lead Ps. 92 (“Mizmor shir leyom haShabbat. Tov lehodot…”) silently, but after a moment of that, a cluster of musically-inclined members of the congregation about a third of the way around the circle from my position spontaneously began a tune, which quickly caught on.

Tzadik Katamar: When we reached this part of Ps. 92, Getzel led us singing through the end of the psalm to the tune that I generally refer to as “that one we did at the lay-led services when I was a kid.”

Maariv: For the most part, Maariv was conducted in the mostly-silent-but-with-a-few-lines-of-nusach fashion.

Triumphant Mi Chamocha: Mi Chamocha was sung so triumphantly, you’d have thought there were walls of water to our left and right.

“Chapter, verse!” My mother (who used to shout “Chapter, verse!” in services when I was a kid anytime the page number of the Torah reading was announced rather than the chapter and verse because she always brought a different edition with her) took the opportunity of the silent Hashkiveinu to stand up from the folding beach chair she brought with and ask Getzel to kindly inform us not only of page numbers, but of where in the service we were because lots of people had different machzorim with them. (She had Eit Ratzon with her.)

Veshamru: The Carlebach tune

“We are not praying to the building!” The plaza across the street from Zuccotti Park where we had the service happened to be bordered on the east by the Brown Brothers Harriman building. Before Chatzi Kaddish, AFR announced:

“We are not praying to the building!”

“We are praying to the east!”

“Toward Jerusalem!”

“Not for political reasons!” (The crowd snickers.)

“For spiritual ones!”

The 24-hour drum circle: Occupy Wall Street’s 24-hour drum circle has become (in)famous. Around the time I reached the first Uvechen in the silent Amidah, I was suddenly very aware of its muddy volume leaking across the street, over the falafel trucks that bordered us to the west and all the way to where I was standing in the middle of the Kol Nidrei crowd.

The crowd is leading itself again: We were brought out of our individual Amidahs not by any of the shlichei tzibur, but by an Oseh Shalom that sprung up somewhere within the crowd.

The Tower of Babel: According to my notes, it was around this time that I noticed that the building before us seemed to disappear into the night sky. I couldn’t see its top! Later, I snapped the picture above.

The man who prayed with his feet: A quote from Abraham Joshua Heschel (who marched with MLK in Selma and later famously said, “I felt like my feet were praying”) was featured atop the photocopied supplement we used later in the service. He also put in an appearance here (page 225/24, at this point).

A.J. Heschel on “body and soul”: Sarah led us in reading a comment in the margin in the upper left corner of the page, quoting him on the subject of “body and soul”: “Originally the holy (kadosh) meant that which is set apart, isolated, segregated. In Jewish piety it assumed a new meaning, denoting a quality that is involved, immersed in common and earthly endeavors; carried primarily by individual, private, simple deeds rather than public ceremonies”

Yeah, but how much more public could this particular ceremony get? That may sound counter to the very spirit of this particular venue for Kol Nidrei, but wait until we get to Aleinu to pass judgement on the inclusion of this quotation.

Really loving those 13 attributes: No matter how long it’s been since the last time you went to a Yom Kippur service, there’s one tune you will never dislodge from your brain: “Adonai, Adonai, El rachum vechanun, etc.” So the crowd was understandably jazzed to sing the 13 attributes through by the time we got to them on 229/28.

Animals and stuff: Looking back, I can’t imagine myself enthusiastic about this reading at all, but my notes indicate that we enthusiastically shout-and-response-ed our way through this English reading featuring a bunch of biblical animal imagery (upper left corner of 233/32).

Medieval-style! I also have a note here that says, “Throughout, no need for machzor for C&R.” My point being, I assume, that there was something delightfully medieval about the way this service was conducted. When most communities owned only one copy of the siddur, services were conducted in a very different fashion. With all of this shouting back and forth and with only maybe a quarter of the crowd actually holding a machzor, I sensed a little window back to that.

For example: AFR led us in the series of four verses that begins “Shema koleinu” and ends “kochenu al-ta’azvenu.” Normally, each verse is chanted once by the shatz and then repeated by the kahal. He tried the first verse, “Shema koleinu, Adonai Eloheinu, chus verachem aleinu, vekabel berachamim uvratzon et-tefilatenu.” The crowd–once again, most of whom don’t have machzorim–attempted to repeat it, but we petered out about halfway through.

So he changes it up: For the remaining three verses, he broke it up. For example, the next verse, “Hashivenu Adonai elecha venashuvah, chadesh yamenu kekedem,” was not chanted and then repeated in its entirety. Instead AFR chanted, “Hashiveinu Adonai elecha venashuvah,” and the crowd repeated it back with gusto. Then he chanted the rest of the verse and we repeated. And so on for the remaining two verses of the section.

Anu Amecha: This super-catchy piyut was sung with a lot excitement. When we ran out of words and lapsed into a nigun, it was out of control!

Al Cheit: “We will now list some of our sins!” Getzel shouted before we worked through Al Cheit in English. There’s something be said for standing outside in public with a crowd shouting your sins at full volume. I felt a chill when we shouted, “We have sinned against you by defrauding others.”

Israel and Palestine: Then we read an interpretive version of Al Cheit by Stew Albert and Judy Gumbo. As interpretive readings go, it’s a pretty good and it was an excellent choice for this particular occasion. One line reads, “We have sinned… by not defending Israel.” I didn’t have a copy of the reading, which was some people had in the photocopied packets that were handed out before the service. So I didn’t know what the next line was and got a little concerned. Then we shouted, “…by not defending Palestine.” Nice choice, I thought.

“Yom Kippur is the day that we are forgiven for worshiping the golden calf!”

“What is the golden calf!?”

“It is the essence of idol worship!”

“It is the fallacy that gold is God!”

Kaddish Shalem: Chanted by AFR to the fast tune that has the super-emphatic amens

Aleinu: Instead of just chanting Aleinu, the service finally reached a point where it was just a tad too goofy for me. Aleinu, it was explained, means “it is upon us” so people were invited to shout out something they were going to take upon themselves in the coming year. Then, of course, each of these things were shouted back by the crowd. And then we would all shout, “Aleinu!” and wait for the next person to start hollering out whatever vague ethical something-or-the-other they were going to uphold in 5772. Some of these were insanely long and impossible to repeat back accurately. Topics covered in the various personal Aleinus included:

Palestine

The environment

Racism

Shopping locally

Feeding the hungry

Cancelling Bank of America accounts

Raising kids to have these values

Praying with Christians and Muslims (whether they like it or not?)

And so forth, seemingly interminably

Vene’emar: That rather special “Aleinu” over, we sang the last line of Aleinu and then moved on.

I am pleased to announce that, in response to many of your suggestions,
I have prepared a pocket size weekday version of Siddur Eit Ratzon.

You will be able to carry this siddur with you wherever you go. I hope
this will enable you to replicate during the entire week the positive
Shabbat prayer experiences that you have told me were made possible by
Siddur Eit Ratzon.

This siddur will have the same four-column format as Siddur Eit Ratzon.
Indeed, although there are many new and revised pages, most of the pages in this siddur are the same as those in the regular version of the siddur … but they are smaller. To make the siddur more portable, the pages are reduced to 5.25 x 6.5 inches and the cover is paper. It has 144 double pages and a made-to-last sewn binding.

The prepublication price for a single copy is $22, ($18 plus $4 shipping and handling), to addresses within the United States. (It’s $8 extra for Canada — and an extra $10 elsewhere.)

The siddur will go to the printer in a few weeks, and I expect to be
able to deliver copies in January 2012.

I encourage you to order copies for yourself *now* (and for your
friends) since the first printing will be limited. (You can give copies
as Chanukkah presents although they may arrive a few weeks late.)

Needless to say, this version of the siddur is also appropriate for
congregations as a daily prayer book and for shiva minyans.

Copies can be ordered at the Siddur website – newsiddur.org – just go
to the “Purchase” page; the middle box is for this new siddur.

Many thanks to all of you who have encouraged me and have thanked me for my efforts to make Jewish prayer more accessible and meaningful.

Though the picture is mostly bleak, one group mentioned in the article stands out, New Yachad City. Part of Columbia University Hillel, New Yachad City tries to create services that are more reflective of the diversity of world Jewry.

They lead student excursions to different synagogues around New York City, typically off the beaten path. They also host their own monthly service. This month’s New Yachad City Friday night service is this week and I think I’m gonna go.

Alternative, egalitarian, multi-traditional Kabbalat Shabbat service in Earl Hall on Friday, October 28th at 6 PM. Welcome in the Sabbath with Shabbat tunes from Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Bnai Jeshurun Synagogue, Abudaya Jewish community and much more. Experience Shabbat services in a different way and learn about world Jewry while praying! Everyone is welcome!

David A.M. Wilensky, Proprietor

David A.M. Wilensky is a freelance writer, editor and so-called "Millennial." The former Editor in Chief of New Voices Magazine(2011-2013), David has extensive experience in Jewish communal nonprofits and Jewish journalism. More about David over here....